draft: 15 non-terrible takes on the 2024 U.S. election

At least some of them are about financial markets!!

Trump seems to have won, doesn’t he?

1. With Trump winning, the discussion about devaluing the dollar is very underrated. In the case where the Treasury Department doesn’t stay with Wall Street, check whether it’s in the hands of Robert Lighthizer. He has been plotting a devaluation of the dollar.

2. No, I don’t know how a deval would work. Wadawadawada Plaza Accords II? But that could be the type of rhetoric that could make yields go up and the dollar go down! During the Plaza Accords, they actually just intervened with $35B by the West Germany central bank and Tokyo did some budget cuts. But the dollar would keep devaluing when Reagan administration officials talked about it. I don’t think it’ll continue to happen now, that’s not the base case in the market. But eventually. Or he’ll just pick some Wall Street guy and we’re fine.

3. Entering the year, I was expecting that Wall Street would hate Trump way more than they are doing right now. Interest rates are up, but not by much, and stocks think he’s good. The market understands that he’ll keep most of his tax cuts, maybe we might even get some more trickle-down economics for corporations! What I didn’t anticipate was two things: 1- The tariff talking to raise meaningful revenue for the federal government and 2- The talking about big spending cuts, which were mostly introduced by Musk. The market is clearly giving Trump the benefit of the doubt there.

4. I am obviously skeptical of big spending cuts. It’s mostly entitlements and health care. And defense! I am a macronist liberal on this one: I love pension reform. Pension Reform is like cutting your nails, you need to do it all the time. The old take too much from societies and very few people are willing to talk against the gerontocracy. As I write, Decision Desk HQ is giving Dems 218 expected seats in the House and PolyMarket is giving a 30% probability of a D House in a Trump presidency. Even if they get their trifecta, it’s going to be razor thin. I struggle to imagine the party that can barely elect a speaker will make big spending cuts with a small majority. But I expect the market to give the administration the benefit of the doubt.

5. What seems bad is the Federal Reserve. Trump won’t make the same mistakes again. (Btw, he’s now experienced and had 4 years to think. I expect he won’t repeat the stuff he considered mistakes) He’ll put the most dovish person he can find that can pass the senate. Go read Trillion Dollar Triage.

6. Or maybe not! One of the three lessons of the 2024 election is that Americans hate inflation. It makes sense: everyone feels inflation, while “only the unemployed” feel unemployment. If Trump gets the message, he’ll put someone very dovish there. I’ll be looking for signals, but it isn’t my base case.

   

7. Just to be clear, these are the three big lessons of the 2024 election:

   1. Americans hate inflation.

   2. Americans hate illegal immigration.

   3. Americans hate untruthful politicians.

8. I still think the vice-president should have gone to Joe Rogan. And she should have told more complex stories for voters, for example, of the mistakes of the Biden administration. The way she talks, including in the Fox News interview, sounds very media trained. Go listen Vance in his New York Times interview (that the VP didn’t do). Vance previously called Trump “the American Hitler”, but he gives a narrative on how he changed his views. Indeed, the fact that Vance previously hated Trump is a key reason Trump picked him¹. Harris had plenty of opportunities to show the depth of her character. Maybe she could have publicized how she secretly disagreed with Biden about some important policy decision. She could have explained why they made certain policy mistakes, what she learned, and how she would not repeat those mistakes. But she chose to make no concessions.

   

9. And this leads us to Joe Rogan. President Trump explained that he did a lot of mistakes, mostly personnel picks, because poor him, he didn’t know anyone in D.C. and he was at the mercy of neocons. But he articulated that he would not repeat these mistakes again. President Trump showed the depth of his personality there. And Harris should have at least tried to go there and show her side. Obviously, lots would have had to be changed for things to go her way, as stuff would only have been more evident if she had gone there with her media-trained self.

10. Johnny Harris videos on Trump and Harris were really good. And the character he portrays of her is very decent: she has progressive ethics, but she’s the type of person who does an internship in Reagan’s FTC and has a big status quo bias, during her career as prosecutor, she was very “conservative” on how she pushed for progressive ideals. She even defended the death penalty, even though she’s personally against it. But this wasn’t the story of the election. The story was this woman who run for president as a very leftist senator, which had some leftist economic ideas, and now was surprisingly centrist: she even supports Israel! Why? Who knows! What about trans surgeries of illegal immigrants? She’s going to follow the law!

11. Btw, the pricing controls was when she lost the momentum she had. I’m glad I didn’t say good things about her without a pseudonym.

12. In reality, the best thing that Harris could have done was to not run, and allow someone with a fresh slate that was truthful and meant those things to be elected. People hated they were lied.

    1. Biden wasn’t truthful about his health. Harris wasn’t truthful about Biden’s health. Harris wasn’t truthful about her policy changes,

    2. The solution for democrats going forward is to replace the untruthful people with people that will be perceived as truthful by the electorate. Secretary Buttigieg seems to be able to do that, but that’s a 2,000 feet opinion.

13. The polls were mostly good. And Atlas Intel was REALLY good. r/fivethirtyeight hated them. It seems that querying people on Instagram is a decent way of finding people, instead of calling them on their phones.

14. Another way to say that “politicians should tell the truth” Is that they should have nuance. And the whole “dems are losing young men”, that is common for the left worldwide, is resulted by people not embracing that people might have nuance. As I write this, I am watching a Mar-a-lago live and they were playing Village People’s YMCA. Shoe0nHead has a good video on why men are moving right. But the key is to stop asking people to buy wholesale the identitarian playbook. If you show doubt about trans women in sports, you are immediately lumped together with people who intentionally doesn’t call people by their preferred gender.

15. I might write more in the future, but men are moving to the right because prestige is a zero-sum thing, men need more prestige than women for their own fulfillment, but modern society is giving all the prestige for women (and minorities). If you are a young white man, you are the devil and you owe a lot of stuff, even though you were born after September 11th.

I encourage you to comment, do pushbacks. Are these takes any good? Should I stick to contact center stocks?

1. I remember reading this. Where? I don’t know. But Trump loves giving people second chances and he (correctly) thought that by having Vance as his VP, this would make a better story.